n.e.w.s. is a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe, bringing together different voices, accents and outlooks from the North, East, West and South. | Read more..

Collaboration, if it is to be fruitful, must be founded on an initial diversity. Though it may feel more natural to collaborate with individuals or groups with whom we have much in common, collaboration itself has little to gain from that commonality – for neither party really has much to offer the other and collaborating soon appears unnecessary.

Which is ultimately the more felicitous title: Jules Verne's classic Around the World in Eighty Days? Or Julio Cortázar's cross-purposed variant, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds? The former heralds an awe-inspiring feat in the era of colonial expansion, while the latter seeks to capture the dizzying heterogeneity of our own collaged temporalities -- wheeling motionless through time at eighty-worlds-a-day. One world or many?

CIS (Centre for Internet and Society) hosts an interesting line-up on the 31st of March with the test drive of the Narcissus algorithm and further (Re)search. Last year, n.e.w.s. organized an open call: Shadow Search, which was looking for a specific algorithm. In particular this search engine would allow prospectors in the world of information and databases to discover ‘shadow art activities’ that are partially hidden, off-the-radar, stealthy. Last year a jury gathered at CIS to evaluate the 5 entries and after much deliberation, a winner was chosen, 'Narcissus', by Phil Jones and Aharon Amir. This algorithm is now being launched at CIS on March 31, 2011.

The corpus of objects being tested by the Narcissus search engine is the data uploaded from the students from the Dutch Art Institute, Srishti School of Art, Design, Technology, Shantiniketan and CKP for 'Space the Final Frontier'. The past three weeks the students have been indexing the shadow worlds of Bangalore with various art projects, which were physically exhibited at CKP on March 17th, 2011. The Shadow Search Platform (SSP) will continue at the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technologythis year as a full-time project, in which various aspects of art-related activities as well as their visibility, searchability and accessibility will be investigated by participants and visiting faculty.

Negotiating Equity is the name of one of the ongoing & energetic projects at the heart of the DAI ‘s curriculum. The nine student participants in Negotiating Equity are now embarking on a two-week voyage to India to collaborate with Srishti School of Art and Design and CEMA (The Centre for Experimental Media Arts). Their first pit stop will be New Delhi with a half-day seminar with Raqs Media Collective and a visit to Khoj, an artist led, alternative space for experimentation and international exchange.

Upon arrival in the IT capital Bangalore, Space The Final Frontier commences, an expansive trans-spatial /trans-local investigation into the notion of ‘space’.

Paula Bialski is a sociologist and postdoctoral research fellow based at Leuphana University’s Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL). Her past work ethnographically studied Couchsurfing.org and online hitchhiking websites (mitfahrgelegenheit.de) in order to map out the way interaction is being initiated online in order to create interaction offline.

Marsha Bradfield is a mongrel cultural producer. Across her practice as an artist, curator, writer, educator and researcher, she co-creates projects that grapple with authorship as always already collaborative and contingent, subject to both specific and systemic conditions and shot through with a polyphony of voices past, present and future too. Marsha is especially interested in the interdependence of cultural production, with this spread across...

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer, editor and critic occupied mainly with questions around art, labour and value. She is the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, early 2016) and A for Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Textem, late 2014). She also writes often with Anthony Iles and with Melanie Gilligan. She often works with artists and contributes to journals such as Mute, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, South Atlantic Quarterly, Parkett, and OPEN!

Armin Beverungen currently is the Junior Director of the Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL) at Leuphana University. Before joining the DCRL he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hybrid Publishing Lab. Armin conducts research at the interstices of media and organisation studies. He is a member of the editorical collective of the open access journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization and with colleagues at Leuphana recently set up the new open access journal spheres: journal for digital cultures, which launched this week.

Stephanie Rothenberg is an interdisciplinary artist who engages participatory performance, installation and networked media to create provocative public interactions. Mixing real and virtual spaces, her work investigates new models of global, outsourced labor and the power dynamics between contemporary visions of utopian urbanization and real world economic, political and environmental factors.

Kuba Szreder – graduate of sociology at Jagiellonian University (Krakow). He works as an 'independent' curator, his interdisciplinary projects combine artistic practices with critical examination of society. In 2009 he initiated Free / Slow University of Warsaw, together with Bęc Zmiana Foundation. In his theoretical research he critically reflects upon the contemporary apparatus of cultural production and its socio-economic context.